Running a business in 2026 means running a small procurement department on the side. You start with one tool. Then you need invoices, so that is another. Then scheduling, e-signatures, forms, proposals, a bit of image editing, and suddenly your bank statement reads like a Spotify playlist of things you half remember signing up for.
Depending on who is counting, the average company now runs anywhere from 106 to 342 SaaS apps, and after two years of everyone swearing they would consolidate, app counts are climbing again, up 11% year on year, with mid-market firms jumping from 116 to 164 apps in a single year. At the small end, businesses now spend roughly $156 per user per month on SaaS, up from $112 in 2023, and the total software bill has reached around $7,900 per employee per year, a rise of about 27% in two years.
Here is the part that stings. You do not use most of it. Roughly 53% of SaaS licences sit idle, and even the tools you do open are sold to you whole when you only wanted two features. You are paying for the buffet and eating the bread rolls.
And there is a second, quieter problem on the other side of the transaction. The people making these small, genuinely useful tools cannot get distribution. Their main alternative channel is dying in public: AppSumo's founder disclosed in February that revenue had halved over two years, and its marketplace deals take roughly 70% of the revenue in exchange for a one-off cash injection that leaves the maker supporting a customer forever for free.
Two starving parties. Buyers with too many bills, makers with no customers. Nobody has built the thing that sits between them.
A software co-op: one monthly membership that unlocks a curated, growing library of the everyday tools a small business actually runs on.
Launch narrow: 15 to 20 tools aimed at one persona, priced around $49 per month, which is under a third of what the average small business already spends per user.
Market size